Surely there must be other people interested in the art of tagging... Hopefully this can turn into a discussion of tagging knowledge.
Conventions: • Verbs: prefixed with a "!", like "!to_read" or "!installed" (e.g. a Firefox extension). I should probably drop the "to", but part of me can't let it go... http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/%21to_read • Multiple word tags: especially people, like "Tom_Friedman" or "global_warming" or "google_earth". (CamelCase could be an alternative.) http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/Bruce_Schneier • Attribution: to document where I learned about it (people in my network mostly, but only when I remember that it came from them), like "via:preoccupations" http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/via%3Apreoccupations • Me, myself, and I: tag anything to do with me with "self" http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/self
Things I could do better: • I find I'm inconsistent with putting quotes around excerpted descriptions. • One of these days I'm going to "clean up" my tags, collect the orphans into bundles, etc.
Out of the ordinary things tagged: • Some favorite words: http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/favorite+word • Software I've installed: http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/%21installed • Meta: About:blank (and the delicious URL for about:blank) http://delicious.com/earth2marsh/blank • Singleton podcasts: turned into a subscribe-able feed with Yahoo Pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/earth2marsh/deliciouspodcast
What tagging tips do you have or strange things you do?
Nice post. I happen to have a lot of "via:preoccupations" bookmarks too! I wonder if David's ears are burning. In any case, I think "via" tags are fun and useful, and I use them a lot. It's also neat for ego-searching: http://delicious.com/tag/via:britta
I could go on and on about my tags if there weren't other threads to respond to, but for now you can check out http://delicious.com/britta for the special Unicode tags (with tag descriptions), and the weird differentiation between "music" and "music/meta", among other things...
With apologies for the double post, I've copied from another thread some notes on insights and strategies that helped me move from being a tagging resister to a tagging enthusiast:
• the most efficient way of creating tags (or tag strings) is to think as if you were structuring a search query: what would I specify (instinctively more than systematically) if I were searching for this item in a system unknown to me? • tagging can also be thought of as cross-referencing that's instant, intuitive, and adaptable • if you need to systematize your tags by grouping them, you have bundles • at least two levels of "missing" hierarchy - more general and more specific - can be supplied by unbundled tags: e.g. "gay" as a category too broadly diverse to be bundled (sex? gender? civil rights? culture? history? some in one case, some in another?); "Alice" as a reference to a specific fictional character who appears in at least three art forms • you may find that some familiar categories - in my case, for example, "tools" - are so broad that they simply "wither away" because given the flexibility of tags, they become superfluous.
source: http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=517&page=1#Item_8 Britta has also posted some helpful comments about tagging in that thread.
I love tagging. I think of it as a challenge to pull all the ideas out of what I've just read whilst also adding my own context to check my understanding. I've found the more I've enjoyed an article, the more tags I apply to it. I want to capture all the ideas and associations I've made in such a way that I never need to read that article again, rather, just look at the tags and get the bigger picture as well as the details.
I'm not sure I have many tagging quirks. I never use dashes or dots to separate words in tags. I'd really rather everyone stuck to onewordtagswithoutspacers, to be honest. It would set a common standard. People can always use camelCase to differentiate words and they'll always be evaluated to a lowerCase=lowercase equivalent. I use CamelCase for names only.
I use via: tags even for non-delicious users. I know sources might see my links on my RSS and I want to acknowledge their recommendation and publicly thank them.
Bundles are fun. I try to "garden" my tags every month. I'm always renaming misspelt tags when I see them come up in auto complete. I'm a bit of a neat freak like that. Also, to get a better grip on some tags, I rename them but with two or three words rather than just one. I do this when I need to add some kind of higher/lower context around a tag. It's a quick way to add context globally.
When bookmarking, I tend to freestyle tag, starting with the most concrete and then getting increasingly abstract. Also, for bookmarks that I'm adding a lot of context to (I hope) I reorder my tags so that they explain my interpretation in sequence, almost like a little story. I find myself worrying about what tags should follow the one previous so that reading is smooth. I guess I use delicious more as an understanding tool, rather than purely for bookmarking and recall. I publish my daily links on a blog and I include tags. For me, tagging is a quicker form of writing and note-taking.
Rather than including publication tags on each bookmark, I reorder the bookmark title to make the source clearer, eg. "Wired -- New Science Story..." If I added a publication tag then I'm likely to want to add publication dates for completeness. I've not found a need for searchable dates yet.
I make custom tags for the research I do for clients. I make a unique tag and provide them with a URL and RSS feed so I can keep pinging them with stuff. I love how delicious works to stream information around by tag. And now with addressable tag bundles I can do so much more gathering and gardening.
My favourite tag right now is http://delicious.com/adamcrowe/continuouspartialattention
I also love to quickly bash in five ***** for favourite bookmarks.
I've been thinking about using @ as a prefix for sending certain links into twitter or riendfeed. I'm not that's very useful, I just like the idea!
I'm still not sure on what to do with the multiple-words-tags .. I decided to just tag them as two separate words, so global and warming instead of global_warming or globalwarming. I think it's more flexible this way (I mean, what if local warming becomes an issue all of a sudden and I want to write something about warming in general? :-) I'd like to hear what others think are the pros and cons of one-word-tags vs multiple-words-tags.
Another thing I'm not sure about is on using singular or plural words .. do I tag this cool car article with "car" or "cars"? I try using the plural form, but sometimes find myself using both because I just don't know ..
I use the tag 'globalwarming' bunched together, and I could always rename the tag to 'global warming'. That would give me a new 'global' context to apply to other tags.
I believe tagging strategies have to evolve over time and I try to keep a look out to see if renaming my tags would help other people.
I choose plural because they'll be many. Maybe this is easy to agree in the case of concrete nouns.
Page 6 of this presentation summarises the unconsistencies of tagging across a large system.
I have the same issues with multiple words and plurals - I decided that plurals might be better because if you search for "blog," for example, "blogs" will also show up in that search, but not the reverse.
I got rid of a lot of my multiple_word_underscore tags just because they bugged me and were too long - took up too much space in the tag cloud.
I just realized tagging bookmarks is a great way to let your OCD out to play... :)
The advantage of the underscore method is this is the default way Delicious imports two word tags from other sources (such as other bookmarking services that allow two word tags with no underscore, or from my browser, where several folder names were multiple words).
The disadvantage is that it's not intuitive - I've combined two words into one, such as webdesign, and a lot of others do the same with that one in particular. Not all tags are that easy, though. I try to think of one word alternatives that would work better, and have been successful in most cases. Sometimes I hyphenate. Or generalize. Instead of global_warming, for instance, I might tag the bookmark with climate, warming, issues, environment. "Climate change" is a more appropriate (scientific) term than global warming, anyway :) Of course you can search your bookmarks, and any elucidation you add in the comments will help you find exactly what you want, too.
With the ability to click on related tags being the same as using an AND operator, using two separate words works well, too, though.
I hope Delicious implements lots of the suggestions for making editing tags and bundles simpler (I just posted a long and detailed treatise on this earlier today - ha) so that we can all enjoy organizing and sharpening our tagging skills even more!!
earth2marsh: i like and use the via:username tag but I found out some others instead adopted the cite:username tag.
Another idea which I haven't yet fully implemented is to use the via:something tag even if the credited party has no account on del.icio.us but using a domain-type logic and some scripting to make a clickable link out of it, which would be very nice when sharing/republishing bookmarks (which I do a lot).
When I've had enough coffee, I try to tag a minimum of 5 times per link. That way in the future I don't have to remember which specific tag goes with which bookmark.
Plus with the related tags feature just introduced it makes it really easy to find the bookmark you want, eg London>what'son>cinema or travel>japan>accommodation.
my resolution to the plural/singular question (and in some cases the noun/adjective question) is to use the first form that pops into my mind. If in the process of tagging you notice that you have 25 items tagged harddrives and one tagged harddrive (or the reverse for another tag), that tells you something about how your mind thinks of that category, as do 40 tags labeled "diagnostic" and 3 labeled "diagnosis" (assuming you're not making a distinction between those latter tags).
I find the slightly-obsessive aspect of tagging to be fun, too. You get to create your own way to order your knowledge. You can think of it as something of a "game of tidying up" - http://interconnected.org/home/2005/08/01/as_previously_considered .
But at the same time, I like that there are plurals and inconsistencies and weird punctuation in people's tags. That means that when you're looking for something, whether you spell it http://delicious.com/tag/bookmarks or http://delicious.com/tag/bookmarking - somebody will have tagged it like that.
An idea I had about multiple tags, CamelCase and underscore_combinations was to use tag combinations within bundles, i.e. a bundle of "People" might contain Albert+Schweitzer and Albert+Einstein. This way one could tag individual items with "Albert+Einstein" or "Albert+Schweitzer", and include both of them as separate entities into a bundle while still finding both with just "Albert". As it turns out, del.icio.us handles the plus sign not as a combination but escapes it (eg. http://delicious.com/grissom/John%2BShirley as opposed to http://delicious.com/grissom/John+Shirley)...
Having the '+' sign in the original item's tags might even be a hint towards the relationship with other tags, as "Albert" would be related to both "Einstein" and "Schweitzer", but once in the combination, "Albert+Einstein" wouldn't show up as related to "Albert+Schweitzer". Not sure if I make sense here, but it might be worth considering.
I was thinking of using Microformats as tags, like rel=me for my own sites or the like. But they don't apply to everything. I'm just toying with this idea...
Nah, I like the messiness in other people's tags. Having excessively tidy tags can also be limiting - I find that I resist creating a "new" tag even when it would be helpful, because I feel like I'd have to go through my bookmarks and apply that tag to all the eligible bookmarks! That was reasonable when I had 900 bookmarks, but at 3300, it doesn't make sense.
This means my tag list is somewhat stagnant, but that's OK. The result is that I'm very familiar with each of my main tags and how I use them. I don't have to wonder whether I tagged something "politics" or "government" and look through both tags, because I know what criteria I use to apply each of those tags. I suppose, then, that I use tags more like categories than like keywords, but that's part of what's nice about tags: they let you decide how you want to use them.
I'd actually welcome being shown more tags. And I'd do a quick renaming/addition hack to include them. Though, admittedly, I haven't done that much.
When I bookmark something, and after having saved it finding that is already popular, I go into the history and look for the tags people have used. I do this for three reasons (I'm post-rationalising):
1. To check I haven't missed an obvious tag that does a far better job of summarising the bookmark
2. To check for popular tags that I could inclue to add weight to a particular context that I feel is important (kinda the same as 1 but not motivated by the fear of stupidity)
3. To find new interesting tags that add context, either higher or lower, giving me greater understanding of the subject. This helps me tag garden, though I've found I'm usually the person adding the most tags to stuff, but I want the best tags in any case.
I really worry about stagnation in my tags, because it feels like I'm not learning any new concepts. (My tag count is 2600+, though I'm not sure they are all equally useful!)
I very rarely go back into old bookmarks to look for updates. I would welcome a feature that recorded subsequent activity on a bookmark, after my having saved it, and that sends me a weekly summary of tags so that I could quickly review them.
britta, thanks for giving me a justification about my tags, when i saw that i had around 400 tags that had only one item, i went crazy, and wanted to find a system that would enable me to use max. 100 tags. But then i found a user that had aroung 700 tags, and i said to myself: To hell with it. That's how tags work.
BTW, did anyone know that when you bookmark a flickr picture, and for example add only the tag flickr: delicious shows the photo as well on the left side. delicious.com/jeton/flickr This way you can have a gallery of your favorite photos from flickr on delicious. Nifty! Although i used to have around 260 flickr bookmarks, i migrated them to Flickr as favorites there.
I'm guessing this is something that delicious & Flickr have agreed upon.
I'm with Britta in that I love the freedom of delicious. I think that each person should tune his tags to his own worldview. There's not one correct worldview. Each view gives different insights.
@britta - "I find that I resist creating a "new" tag even when it would be helpful, because I feel like I'd have to go through my bookmarks and apply that tag to all the eligible bookmarks!"
YES! I am learning to be more liberal in my application of tags, to increase specificity, because, after all, why am I bookmarking these if not to make them easier to find later using tags? I, too, resist making up new tags, but of course when Delicious integrates bulk editing options and editing of search results, adding the newly created tags to all appropriate bookmarks will be much easier (hint hint wink wink nudge nudge) :)
At first I thought having "science" was good enough. But now I realize it's woefully inadequate! I need "science, chemistry, periodic_table" or "science, biology, evolution" or "science, teaching, biology, genetics, games." I do have biology and teaching and evolution, but other more specific fields need tags too, and I need a way to distinguish interesting science articles from teaching methods from sites for students. I used to have a "sites_for_students" tag from a folder imported from my browser, but I got rid of it because the underscores bugged me!! Oh dear. OCD isn't ~always~ productive in the right ways, is it?
There are ~endless~ ways to keep this "game of tidying up" going forever... didn't I have something else I was supposed to do today? ha.
@endolith - I agree - I prefer the ability to have multiple word tags without using runons or under_score or CamelCase.
Then again, I'd like a few more characters on Twitter, too... sometimes those very limitations are the ones that inspire and enhance our creativity. Maybe that's one of the fun things about figuring out (and re-figuring out) systems of tagging - being creative within those limitations.
Not that I'm saying I don't want those limitations expanded, mind you! :)
Heh, I had a tag for periodic table bookmarks a while ago, but I merged it into the chemistry tag. One way I get around the need to apply a new tag to everything is my new-ish "wacky" bundle with special tags on specific subjects - http://delicious.com/britta/%7Cmoviedetails - I don't mentally require those tags to be comprehensive, just interesting.
I believe that tagging isn't OCD-like behavior at all, but that it brings up an ancient anxiety about organizing information. Yes! This is where my other side comes out (I'm a Literature student during the school year). I found "Glut" by Alex Wright (http://www.alexwright.org/glut/) to be an interesting read as a history of information architecture, aka tagging and categorizing. It's not a perfect book by any means - the author doesn't seem to value the Web and tagging nearly as much as I think he should, and there are some silly bits about genetics - but it's a good story about how people have organized information since back in the day when we started thinking consciously. And I have this wild idea about tags as Deleuzian rhizome...but that's a story for another day.
We've been considering allowing comma-separated tags in addition to space-separated tags, but this would be a big change and so we need to think very carefully about it.
I remember my first chaotic attempts at tagging where I'd go tag-crazy (cuz I never would remember what I'd look things up as), and then I saw joshua's tags and thought... hmm two or three tags per item seems so much nicer.
Usually when I do web searches, I use two or three terms max, so whatever I find gets tagged with those words.
Now that delicious search engine is fast, I search for my stuff for retrieval and use the tags as a kind of rediscovery... and I go on periodic normalizing binges where I just clean up and rename my tags... ah all the rainy day activities... which I do when it's not raining ;)
2mm: So...Alex Wright's book traces information architecture through two archetypes, networks and hierarchies, with each one developing into the other (and then back again) over time. I consider categories to be hierarchies and tags to be networks, and those ideas have some greater significance: top-down power structures and bottom-up power structures. And Deleuze and Guattari wrote the deepest stuff about this - http://interconnected.org/home/more/2005/06/1000Plateaus00Rhizome.pdf
Meryn's tag bundles remind me of faceted classification, which adamcrowe referenced above in one of his links. Here's my bookmark about this: http://www.pixelcharmer.com/fieldnotes/2003/faceted-movable-type/index.html . Back in 2004 I tried doing some faceted classification of my bookmarks, but that was tedious and didn't last long.
> categories to be hierarchies and tags to be networks
makes a lot of sense, and the great things about tags is they can make sense in different ways, to different folks, a multiplicity of meaning, poetic ambiguity (versus agoraphobia in the judgemental katagoria)?
thanks, so much to ponder - and would love to hear more, here or elsewhere :)
delicious might help the singular/plural issue by allowing users to somehow mark themselves as 'is a' or 'member of'. I'm an 'is a', such that a tag 'blog' refers to one blog, and 'blogs' refers to a page about many blogs. This allows for a finer granularity than the 'member of' form. But maybe that's just me.
A delicious enhancement could enable 'member of' users to search my 'blog' tag if they entered 'blogs', and could allow me, as an 'is a' user, to see 'member of' users posts tagged 'blogs' if I just enter 'blog'.
Nonetheless I see the slippery slope here. Perhaps a better way would be some sort of tag mapping - I could map my 'globalwarming' to 'global+warming' or even 'climatechange' of another user. That brings to mind a whole new tag-mapping visualization feature to allow interested users to more closely align their tags.
Sounds like you guys might be interested in this visualization tool: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/%7Ehmdb/infovis/delicious/del.icou.us%20visualization.html - it's a type of tags-in-common browser.
One issue I see with building a way for people classify their tags like that: I imagine only a minority of people would be interested in doing it. Many people like to just tag their bookmarks and move on to doing other things, and they probably wouldn't want to go through and carefully map out meanings for their tags. I think some kind of automatic tag cluster-detecting might help more.
Here's something I would very much like to see happening, or perhaps it is but I don't know how yet.
I'm a big fan of the networking capability, which allows to put together a bunch of stellar minds and mutually inform each other of our discoveries.
However, that is at the very general 'whole person' level.
What if we could easily find 'related tags'. For example my tag Open-Hardware would be equivalent to someone elses opensourcehardware etc...
It would be nice if by clicking on any tag that we use, we could find tags by grade of similarity for example, and out of that, we could create collective feeds on very specialized topics .. of course, I guess this is possible manually, but if the process could be eased ...
Perhaps all that's neccessary is to allow tag descriptions to be turned into rooms. That way interest around a tag can be pooled.
If many similiar rooms are created around very similar tags, people will inevitably become conflicted over what room is the most appropriate for their tags, hopefully prompting a discussion to refactor and rename.
The system probably can't say this explicitly, but there are 3 behaviours on delicious (?):
1. SAVE. Users who just want to bookmark for later retrival (90%?) 2. MORE. Users who want more bookmarks of a particular tag or tags (9%?) 3. PIVOT. Users who want to find new context and make new connections. (1%?)
PIVOTs are in the minority, so it's unlikely that new features would be added for them, and besides, it's probably better for them work together to find their own solutions. Twine.com would be great if it allowed users to pipe *in* RSS feeds
In the opensource hardware example above, ideally you'd tag it for yourself in way that you findmost useful: 'open-hardware', and also tag it so that it was more easily available to other people's searches: 'opensource' 'hardware'.
I do that on a few tags and always check each bookmark to make sure I'm using global tag structures.
The del.icio.us Complete add-on for Firefox was great at showing you popular, recommended and suggested tags when posting bookmarks. Those fields no longer work with the new delicious. I still use DC with Firefox 2. It won't work with FF3, hence I haven't upgraded.
... in the aspect of (information) architecture, the best strategy, plan or structural design would be to use simple units (e.g. tags) and get the most out of it ... to have a cheap and easy to build, nonetheless elegant and steadfast building, to retrieve the information you ask for in a fast and efficient way.
How about doing it this way:
Just use ONE word tags, even if you c o u l d use MULTIPLE word tags, e.g. "continuous partial attention" instead of continuous_partial_attention, continuous-partial-attention, continuous.partial.attention, continuouspartialattention, ContinuousPartialAttention ...
In the "explore tags" field just enter the three words "continuous partial attention" and ... you got it, with the addition of some of the above mentioned 5+ tag variations users might have used (just to be sure ;-). Prefixes/Suffixes can always be added with another tag, abbreviation (#cpa, !cpa, ...). If you enter only 2 of the words, you'll get even more variation. Be careful, however: keep an eye on renaming and singular/plural usage! Anyway, in my opinion, this structure is most flexible and absolutely flat.
@adamcrowe: your rooms provide a "semantic" background to tags, like bundling ... a two-step hierarchy ... can bundles be used as rooms? @mbauwens: "grade of simularity" also has kind of a semantic aspect, I think ...
I think mbauwen's 'related tags' could be generated by my hypothetical automatic tag-clustering system. :)
adamcrowe: In the future, after we've polished the new Delicious to a reasonably satisfying degree, we'll be working on new features, including something similar to "groups" - which I think will help people in those "MORE" and "PIVOT" types as they gather and share bookmarks. Also, the bookmarklet and add-on bookmark-saving interfaces both include popular and recommended tags, and there's a version of del.icio.us Complete that Murklins modified to work with Firefox 3: http://murklins.talkoncorners.net/extensions.html
navegador: I agree, keeping tags flat and flexible is important and allows for building more complicated systems on top.
@navegador Bundles could work. It would be interesting to see stats on popular bundle names. Though, I tend to use mine as tags rather categories (I think). To be honest, I'm not sure I actually USE my bundles. Everything happens in the posting interface for me, and then in the bookmark history pages.
That auto-tag-clustering system sounds awesome!
Looking forward to any kind of group features. It will be interesting to see what people do with them.
@britta Thanks for the heads up. I tested the new bookmarklet briefly. I liked the access to tags, but didn't like not being able to expand the size of the box. I'm happy with FF2 and DC1.3 for now until either break.
Oh, and even though the bookmarklet gives me access to popular tags, I'd still go inside the bookmark history to read the notes, so I can pick up any additional useful tags there.
Here's a fantastic video about organizing information and the web2.0 revolution of tagging and the like: Information R/evolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM
I also like another of their videos, The Machine is Us/ing Us: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
Thanks, navegador, for explaining a technique I've only inconsistently applied but found useful: granularizing or "breaking" phrases for flexibility. I would have mentioned this in my tips, but was not sure I could explain it clearly or succinctly.
As a single example, I eventually found it useful to break off "soft" and "hard" as tags: My system doesn't really need "software" and "hardware" as categories, since I rely on implication (e.g., "applications"=>software) for these. On the other hand I found the hard/soft distinction useful as add-on filters for tags like "porting" or "disks". I'm not sure I'll stick with this system, or how widely applicable it is, but it illustrates one way in which tagging differs from a hierarchical system; "hard" and "soft" might seem ridiculous as folder labels, and in any event range across too many specific areas to be useful as such. But as particularizing tag filters, I find them helpful.
Thanks to all for an interesting and stimulating discussion! Best, M.
edit: I think I was off the mark in referencing bulk editing here, but the main point of this postscript holds: the rename tags function allows easy clean-up, modification, or granularizing of the tags we create on the fly.
@Michael.Massing 1: I also found the "." best applicable in "tag.phrases", which should not be broken up due to legibility. You even use it in your id ;-), I adapted it also, but use it deliberately ...
@Michael.Massing 2: thx for weaving on ... made me bold to scan some (more) of my (formerly) compositetags looking for "break.up.candidates" (some examples): - webdesign (I used this in combination/addition with "web" a/o "design"), so by eliminating the composite form, I reduced both the tag overhead in the affected bookmarqs and the total no of tags, simultaneously increased the outcome of all 3 possible combinations "web", "design" and "web design" and opened it up for new combinations as "social web". - socialmedia, socialnetworking, socialweb, socialetc -> adding the prefix or aspect "social" to a tag set (resp. bookmarq) brings the "social aspect" to the whole crowd, oops cloud ;-) ... - some others illustrating it: modernclassics, lifestreaming, filesharing, search/ing/engine/s, etc. - btw, wouldn't it be better to have a "finding engine" than to have a "searching engine"?
This brings me to the perception, that tags with some commonly, adjectivally used "aspects" like social, sound, web, life, etc. are best examples for "break.up.candidates" or "add-on filters".
Looking at the "post selection": the more "atomic" tags you use, the more (new) results you can get by applying different combinations ... you can even get cross links you never thought of at first ... if too much, you can always tune in another "add-on-filter" ... just deliberately think about the usage of "atomic" (=main) tags ... like britta stated before: "be familiar with each of your main tags and how you use them" :-)
@navegador - I always wondered about slicing up one of the most conventional conventions, the via:user - it seems to be a legacy of faceted classification, the-one-true-way to do things, and works, though perhaps the unconventional might work too using space we could still find via username, or just type via and find all the links we've found via others (ok, I probably fall in the ocd 'class' :)
@Britta, I'm *loving* the bundled subscriptions - something RSS is great for, previously this "channel" was a bit noisy, now we can subscribe to a bundle of tags, it's much more on-topic, keeps the cognitive flow - it's subtle, but marvellous - thanks to whoever had that idea - if they have an amazon wish list i'll gift them a book :)
Could SubscribeToSynonyms could be a pattern - currently we can slice and dice using /tag/blah or tag/blah+yada and get the intersection (a logical and) - bundles let us subscribe to both blah "or" yada - obvious case being "delicious" or "del.icio.us", book/books, books/livres etc.
navegador: Yes, I've adopted the "tag.phrase" format as my default, with many exceptions. It seems to have it over all the other options - except of course "tag phrase" ;^) - for legibility and typability; for me, that trumps its grammatical indefensibility. And yes, "social" and "web" are good examples that I already use. Thanks for articulating a generalization of these as "adjectivally used 'aspects'". One might also think of them as "qualifying" or "particularizing" terms, whatever their word class may be. Happy tagging! M.
Buckminster Fuller has a great quote where he talks about how he doesn't try to change people, he changes the environment to encourage the changes he wants in people. I agree with this: any attempt to create tagging word-choice standards, no matter how noble, well-intentioned, or even correct is going to be taken up by more than a tiny fraction of delicious users.
OTOH the delicious team could add features to make more use of tagging, and enable things to be discovered, in a sense. Building in affordances, perhaps. Such as: add a tag to any tag combination result, or a search result.
So I assemble tags, say javascript+scriptalicious, and with one command I can add a new tag (maybe scriptalicious_javascript_library, but whatever) to all my bookmarks that currently have these two tags.
At the moment, there is no facility to combine two tags into one. This would allow such. Ideally, I would not remove the old tags, since others might have bookmarked my delicious page with this combination.
Similarily, it'd be great to have one command where I could add a single tag result to all my bookmarks found in a search. Even better, this could become a 'smart search', wherein the tag I add is specially treated to rerun the search when I click that tag. Even better still would be to have such a tagged smart search result show up as a regular tag page instead of a search result page.
I wonder how many people bookmark another user's page for a tag?
Say Alice uses 'film' and sees Bob using 'cinema' for the same concept (at least as far as Alice is concerned). So Alice could bookmark Bob's 'cinema' tag page and tag it 'film'.
Now, even better, the delicious software recognizes this new link on Alice's page, and via ajax, offers a capability to expand it inline inside Alice's page. Say a arrow icon or some such. Alice can click this and see all Bob's 'cinema' links indented under Alice's bookmark of Bob's 'cinema' page. (Or, maybe not all, but 10 at a time...)
@mwiik 1: there is a possibility to combine 2 into 1 but it needs a 2-step-effort: 1st: just rename one of the two source tags to target tag (no matter if already used or not); 2nd: rename 2nd source tag to target tag
if you need a copy of the old tag/s, you can split up again (in this case you should use a target tag not already in use)
@mwiik 2: also a semantic thing ... see above: rooms, concepts, bundles ...